|
|
Oct. 14, 2005
Casting light on foreign lands
Safran Foer film adaptation combines humor with understanding.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
In the movie business, there's a well-known saying: "Never
work with children or animals." But since one of the key characters
in Everything is Illuminated is a seeing-eye mutt called
Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, casting the role was a challenge the
movie's producers had to overcome (they decided against having a
sock puppet instead of a real dog).
The dog wasn't the only casting find for this feature, which is
based on Jonathan Safran Foer's critically acclaimed novel and follows
the story of a young American travelling the Ukrainian countryside
in search of the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis,
with a malapropian translator, his curmudgeonly grandad and the
aforementioned dog in tow. Although as the lead character –
also named Jonathan Safran Foer – Lord of the Rings
hobbit Elijah Wood works as more of a setpiece, the actors playing
the translator and his grandfather are pitch-perfect.
This was the first acting role for Eugene Hutz, who plays translator
Alex. In real life, Hutz is the frontman for Ukrainian gypsy punk
band Gogol Bordello in New York – yet he is adroit here in
a persona that requires a keen sense of comic timing and the ability
to register both confusion and a certain world-weariness. Boris
Leskin, meanwhile, who plays Alex's grandfather, is an experienced
Russian actor who genuinely brings Safran Foer's characterization
to life on the big screen.
Written and directed for the screen by award-winning actor Liev
Schreiber and shot by cinematographer Matty Libatique, Everything
is Illuminated is visually majestic; its script much more linear
than the original book. Schreiber deftly illustrates the still-dumpy
cityscapes of eastern Europe, as well as its magical forests. There's
an alternating sense of stillness and motion in many of the scenes.
Safran Foer (the character) is an obsessive collector – as
evidence of which, we see a wall full of plastic sandwich bags filled
with old photographs, dead insects and false teeth – all catalogued
and dated. As he steps meekly from a train at the end of his journey
from New York to Odessa, he is met by Alex, a marching brass band
playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and a sign that says
"Jonfen S. Fur." "My name is Jonathan," he insists,
but nobody pays attention.
The unlikely foursome undertake their journey in search of the lost
shtetl of Trachimbrod in a broken-down Trabant topped by a sign
bearing a Star of David and a notice that announces itself as offering
"heritage tours." Together, Jonathan (wearing a black
suit and monstrously oversized glasses), Alex (nylon shell suit,
Kangol hat and an assortment of gold chains), the grandfather (faded
wool suit and filthy undershirt) and Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior
(a T-shirt reading, "Officious Seeing-Eye Bitch"), traverse
narrow lanes and fields of sunflowers, sidestepping mischievous
children and stray goats.
Much of the film is spattered with laugh-out-loud humor – some
of which more sensitive viewers may perceive as misplaced bigotry.
(The grandfather repeatedly refers to Jonathan as "the Jew"
and Jonathan has to point out to Alex that calling Michael Jackson
a "negro" is inappropriate.) In fact, Safran Foer's –
and Schreiber's – intent is really to poke fun at stereotypes
as a means of furthering cross-cultural understanding. In a story
that begins with complete alienation, the plot spins into a convergence
of shared history and sentiment: the characters who seemed so far
apart geographically and culturally are, in a sense, only neighbors
separated by accident. In the discovery of the sought-for is a collision
of realization that makes for some deeply moving, universally appealing
cinema.
^TOP
|
|
